Hindus From The United States

"[O]nly the quality of the energy... usableness... gets degraded. ...[[Entropy (thermodynamics)|[E]ntropy]] is a measure of this ..."

"[T]he first and second laws of thermodynamics... laws doesn't mean edicts, but ally statements about how matter behaves. Physics is about how matter behaves... [[Entropy (thermodynamics)|[E]ntropy]] tends to go up."

"Negative entropy is a measure of the usableness of the energy. and the of large moving objects is completely usable. energy is not, because [of] the [scrambled] directions of... motions of... particles... That's... . ...[T]emperature is... kinetic energy of the molecules."

"When you panic stop... the of your... moving vehicle gets scrambled to heat by in... brake drums... brake shoes... tire[s] and road. ...[I]f, instead... the energy had been run into a ... you could... use... it to restart your car."

"[O]rganisms live in this cascade of increasing entropy by directing... the increase through their forms. ...[N]egative entropy is food."

"[F]ormation of galaxies and stars would [also]... be impossible except in this cascade of increasing entropy."

"Galaxies are formed when clouds of fall together... The clouds, unlike the stars, are large with respect to the spaces between them... So the [cloud] particles of each collide... and... scramble their motions to . ...energy of falling is transformed to heat. ...[T]he entropy has gone up."

"Stars are not hot because of ... [but] because [of]... energy of falling... transformed to . The heat [of]... fusion... keeps them from collapsing farther and... getting too hot. But it's... temporary."

"The observable Universe has a border... fifteen billion light years distant in all directions, imposed... by... "the expansion." ...At [the border distant objects] ...are estimated ...receding at the speed of light. ...[T]his apparent "expansion" ...imposes a border ...because things receding faster than ...light are not observable. ...[I]f the rate of expansion ...increased, the border would ...be closer."

"Radiation] of matter near the border... would be red-shifted (lowered in frequency)... But if the energy of the radiation of... particles is lowered, so too is the energy of the particles... and therefore also their . (...Einstein's 1905 equations ...)"

"[R]adiation... through a field of low-mass particles would be so often picked up and reradiated that it would be thermalized to 3° Kelvin and... appear as the background radiation discovered by Penzias and Wilson in 1965."

"[I]f the mass of the particles approaches zero, their must... approach zero... [B]y Heisenberg's uncertainty principle... if we... know the momentum... we cannot know that it's at the border... its position."

"[I]f the particles... recycle by "tunneling" back into the observable Universe as (with its ... restored)... the entropy of the... Universe might not increase."

"I like to make fun of the Big Bang. I'm allergic to the Big Bang."

"The Big Bang people wanted to get everything out of nothing. They want us to believe that nothing made everything out of nothing."

"You can't persuade a kid that nothing made everything out of nothing. ...It's impossible to get everything out of nothing."

"[E]ven if you did get nothing to make everything out of nothing, you still have the difficulty that it's in a black hole. Getting it out of a black hole is the second impossibility. We now have impossibility squared."

"Travel is always surprising. You can never read enough about a destination in a book to understand or to see what it's like until you get there. So, I tend to reserve my judgment about places because every time I've gone to different places I've been surprised. And I love that."

"India looks like a jewel from Space."

"Or as Arvind Ghosh puts it with some hyperbole, it is the Sangh Parivar’s strategy to “snatch defeat from the jaws of victory”, to ruin projects which were bound to bring success if only they were pursued with firmness and conviction."

"In India, it is not uncommon that books critical of Islam are banned, for example, .... Arvind Ghosh’s The Koran and the Kafir, yet another annotated enumeration of Quranic injunctions which may adversely affect the relations between Muslims and unbelievers."

"In the 1990s, the late Arvind Ghosh would write pamphlets lambasting the impotence of the RSS to save Hindu girls in Kashmir. His knowledge of significant anecdotes was impressive and his writing lively, but unfortunately, this kind and generous man was into conspiratorial thinking..."

"You can take brass and polish a thousand years. It's never going to be gold. You cannot take a donkey and train for a hundred years. It never could be a horse."

"We’re impressed by the ability of Eastern religions like Hinduism to meet science head-on, agreeing in many respects about important topics, such as the age and size of the universe. Today, Hindu culture is one of the last remaining enclaves of a universal-minded religion."

"After the ball drops on New Year’s Eve, 20 states will raise their minimum wages. This could not have been done without the amazing work of local activists, unions, and the @FightFor15. In 2019, we are going to push for a $15/hour federal minimum wage."

"Our demand for the Green New Deal must be stronger than fossil fuel lobbyists. Our demand for Medicare for All must be stronger than Big Pharma lobbyists. Our demand for Net Neutrality must be stronger than ISP lobbyists."

"Sarah Kliff spent the last year looking at over 1000 ER bills and has found outrageous facility fees, high costs for OTC drugs, and charges for simply sitting in the waiting room. Medicare for All would take these excess costs out of the equation..."

"Our demand for restraint in foreign policy must be stronger than defense contractor lobbyists. Our demand for criminal justice reform must be stronger than the prison-industrial complex."

"Young activists like Greta Thunberg know that the climate crisis we face today was allowed to happen because corporations didn’t care enough about the health of our planet to place any roadblocks on their profits. We must give young people the reins and let them lead on climate."

"Note to Republicans: If we raised the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour, expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit, and created jobs in the areas left behind, then Americans wouldn’t need nutritional assistance to feed their families."

"I’m sure you know that apps are collecting your location data but are you aware that they are also selling this information to third parties? We need an Internet Bill of Rights so people know where their data is being used and how it’s being stored."

"Ending our support of Saudi Arabia isn’t about political gamesmanship. It’s about basic humanity. It’s about doing everything to stop the bombing in Yemen so we can get food and medicine to the hundreds of thousands of children who are at immediate risk of starving to death."

"My bill would allow people to become an apprentice as a painter, as a glazier, as an electrician, to work for a small business, for a union doing private work, and really develop the skills to have meaningful work in either the public sector or the private sector."

"Bernie Sanders & I introduced the Bezos Act a month ago asking billion dollar companies to pay for their employees’ public benefits. We urged Mr. Bezos to raise wages to $15. The beltway economists crucified us. But Mr. Bezos listened. Today thousands of workers are better off."

"Even when 1 in 8 Americans are still food insecure, the USDA wants to strip SNAP benefits from 755,000 Americans over the next few years. Instead of making it harder for people to put food on the table, we should be making sure that nobody goes hungry."

"One member of Congress is already laying the groundwork for a new consensus plan to give everyone a job... most notably, it does not rely solely on public-sector jobs to fill gaps in the market. Instead, Khanna’s plan is based on a program used in Germany that combines increased public-sector work with subsidized private-sector jobs to achieve full employment. Khanna’s plan would work by allowing businesses to take on up to 15 jobs subsidized by the federal government at 120% of the cost of labor and 150% for unionized jobs. The extra money would go toward additional costs for increased employment like training and workspaces."

"We are supporting Saudi Arabia while they inflict unthinkable human rights violations on the Yemeni people. Congress must do its job and stop providing military support and arm sales to the Saudi government."

"The federal minimum wage hasn't gone up in nine years, and in that time the real value has dropped more than a dollar. That's why I support a $15/hr minimum wage."

"To lead in the 21st century, America needs a foreign policy rooted in diplomacy and restraint. We should follow the words of John Quincy Adams, whose Independence Day speech from almost two centuries ago still rings true today. "...Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy..." Full text JQA speech"

"Here’s something that the mainstream media has left out when talking about Trump’s plan to withdraw troops from Syria: Congress never authorized sending troops to Syria. In fact, the UN also never approved. Our troops in Syria are in violation of domestic and international law."

"When progressives remain silent and don’t talk about why the war in Syria is illegal, then into the void step in neocons like Lindsey Graham. Any wonder that our nation remains mired in endless war. Let’s have the guts to stand for responsible withdrawal."

"Of all the students I have taught at The University of Texas at Austin, which were thousands, Yvette Rosser understood India the best."

"The new editions have re-embraced the view of Bangladeshi nationalism that was promoted by the military regimes. However, the BNP's efforts to vindicate the perpetrators of genocide have gone considerably further than even the former textbooks of Zia and Ershad's periods where the word "razakar" still appeared in reference to the murderers of the intellectuals on December 14, 1970. In 1996 era textbooks, the Awami League added "al-badars" and "al-shams" to the list of collaborators, specifically naming the "Jamaat-i-Islami" as culpable in the murder of the intellectuals. The new 2001 genre textbook leaves all of these names out of the narrative and simply blames the deaths of the intellectuals on themselves and on the Pakistani Army. After October 2001, eliminating references to razakars and certainly the Jamaat-i-Islami was an imperative since former razakars and members of the Jamaat are now part of the ruling coalition. ... An important impact of the omissions and extractions is that the genocidal excesses of the infamous collaborators, the razakars are ignored and thereby excused. This deflection of guilt by the Jamaat-i-Islami was one of the first orders of business for the BNP/Islamists political dispensation that came to power in October 2001."

"Several years ago, I was told by a leading professor of "South Asian Studies" at a major University that I "should never report anything positive about the BJP" (Sangh Parivar combine) or I "would never find a job in American academia". A colleague of mine submitted a manuscript for publication to Oxford University Press, Delhi and the then editor of OUP informed her that it was a good manuscript but since it had passages that reflected positively on the Sangh Parivar they could not publish it. He said if she would remove the passages that were not critical of the Hindu Mahasabha and the BJP then OUP would consider publishing her book – otherwise it was against their policy. Amazing isn't it?"

"During the summer of 2000, a very public controversy arose surrounding the excavation of a 10th century Jain Temple in Fatehpur Sikri where the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) had unearthed a pit filled with numerous damaged, broken statues. The debate about this archeological find offers an example of not only the ideological gulf dividing social scientists in India, but is indicative of the manner in which opposing camps of scholars have been using the popular media to sensationalize their perspectives. After the newspapers reported about this particular excavation site, Prof. K.N. Panikkar, Prof. Romila Thapar, Prof. K.M. Shirmali, Prof. Harbans Mukhia from JNU and Prof. Ifran Habib from Alighar Muslim University and several Indian academics who never miss a chance to oppose, condemn, and ridicule the "Sangh Parivar" accused the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) of acting irresponsibly by excavating this destroyed Jain temple saying it was an example of "saffron archeology"."

"When I make presentations about India at teachers' conferences or in classrooms, the two most often asked questions are: "Why do women wear a 'dot' on their foreheads?" and "Why, when there is so much poverty in India, don't they eat all those cows?" These questions broach issues of relevance and correlating non-Western practices to similar experiences in the students' lives, within a context they can comprehend."

"Proposals to include Sanskrit in the course offerings were rejected numerous times by scholars who wanted to protect JNU from what they considered to be a majoritarian or Hindu Nationalist agenda. When I questioned Romila Thapar, a well known historian from JNU, about this issue in July 2000, she explained that if students want to learn Sanskrit, “there are so many Maths and Piths around where they can go”. She added that “most of the regional colleges have some kind of Sanskrit program”."

"For me, as a researcher, the level of condemnation and the condescension among historians in India was impressive and easy to document. Uncomfortably, even engaging the Indo-centric perspective as something worth discussing caused a few historians at JNU and NCERT to ask me if I was a fascist sympathizer. Numerous times, I was told that in their estimation the blossoming Indic orientation in the interpretation of history was invalid, dangerous. I was warned that anyone who considered issues broached by the BJP, such as the unequal implementation of secularism in the Indian context or possible changes in the narration of history, was obviously politically tainted, ideologically contaminated, or just plain misguided."

"One informant told me that, “Indian Marxist historiography was not a reaction to an overbearing nationalistic historiography. It simply took up the thread of colonial historiography, thus enjoying a position of dominance from the beginning. The thrust of their endeavour has been hostile to Indian nationhood from the beginning and without limitation.”"

"Dr. Arjun Dev had explained to me a few weeks earlier that it is forbidden to write negativly about Islam in NCERT textbooks because it can foment communalism. He went so far as to say that “anyone who writes bad things about Islam could be arrested”... "We are very careful not to write anything that could be construed as defamatory against Islam or any religion.""